Finally some excitement at work.

I've been waiting for awhile to have some excitement at work. Finally we got it. We had to cancel a sports tournament because the organizers hadn't followed some rules.

What an outcry! You'd think the world was ending with the angry phone calls and emails. These are 14 year old boys. Trust me, they'll get over it in about 24 hours.

Lots of hysterical people demanded that we be fired for enforcing the rules. Even a few people within the organization said we were in the wrong - which frankly shocks me.

If you don't want your team abiding by the rules, withdraw from the league. Play the other teams who also have agreed NOT to abide by the rules.

If you think the rules are unfair try to change them. There's a process for that.

If you none of the above applies, lead by example and teach your kids that self-sacrifice is sometimes the right thing to do.

How to break someone.

I think sports psychology is a pretty interesting. I took a university course about it years ago and don't remember much from that course except that the professor was a flamboyant guy.

I was reading The fighter's mind : inside the mental game by Sam Sheridan and he tells the story about a chess teacher who grouped players into two piles: 1) Entities and 2) Cumulatives.

Entities believed that they were born with innate chess talent and skill. Cumulatives believed there was a step-by-step process to follow that would slowly improve their skills.

The coach gave both groups and impossible chess task. Both groups failed. But on the next problem he gave them, the entities were devastated. They shut down. They tended to fail again.

The cumulatives, on the other hand, did better.

I'm not sure how true this story is because I heard the exact story in another book phrased as a scientific experiment. Pretty interesting though.

Then he talked about "big punchers" in boxing. These are guys who have one huge, invincible punch. Like Mike Tyson.

If a big puncher hits a guy and he can take it, and the big puncher does it again and again - the opponent taking all the punishment with no problem - eventually the puncher's spirit breaks and he gives up.

If sports were played backwards...

The season would start with randomly placed standings and the teams would play the schedule, evening out all the wins and losses until the final game of the season, which would end in a 0-0 tie, with the team having a record of 0 wins, 0 losses and 0 ties.

The season would start with one team jumping around and cheering, then calming down and returning the championship trophy.

Players would go to the penalty box and after a few minutes the referee would blow the whistle and tell the players to leave the box. The best players would spend the whole game trying to take back their points, and the opposing team would spend the whole game trying to stop them.

Fans would come to the game excited and cheering, then as the game started, they'd calm down and relax until the game ended, when they'd stand up head to the concourse, buy a program, return their tickets to the box office and head back to the parking lot.

Coaches would start the game by shaking hands, then yell at their players, then calm down as the score decreased to 0 and then leave the playing field, ignoring everything except the game's strategies, which they think about in detail.

They'd think about the game for the next few days until the beginning of the next game.

The players would show up to practice, exhausted. Then, as they practiced, would gain more and more energy until practice ended, at which point they wouldn't feel tired at all.

The coaches would explain a complicated instruction and the team would practice the instruction well, but get worse and worse at it, the more they practiced; until eventually they couldn't perform it anymore.

Legendary athletes would return all their awards, come out of retirement, do amazingly well, then get worse and worse as they grew younger and younger. Slowly everyone would forget about them.

Being an umpire has to be one of the worst sports careers.

Just finished reading Bruce Weber’s As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires. I had never been a big fan of baseball’s umpires – I always thought they had too much power, were lazy, arrogant, etc. Now I just feel sorry for them.

It has to be the worst job in sports. Everyone hates you. Booed by the fans, yelled at by the managers, ripped apart by the media and disrespected by the players. All your mistakes are displayed for the world to see, on giant screens and video replays.

The book makes it clear that the league doesn’t think much of the umpires. The general managers think of them as a necessary evil and even their own union is often divided and contentious.

It’s hard work too. There’s nothing like baseball umpiring in any other sport. In baseball, an umpire makes a call on every play of the game. Most calls are routine, but lots of calls are hard to impossible.

It’s not all bad, you make good money, right? Sure, six figures, if you make it to the big leagues. But those jobs are few and far-between, and big league umps often toil for decades in the minor leagues, working away from home for half the year, shuffled around from crappy city to crappy city, sleeping in motels and eating fast food.

Then there are the injuries. Umping is a dangerous job. They suffer from heat stroke from wearing pads in 100 degree weather, broken fingers from foul ball tips, concussions from being hit with bats, back strains from squatting hundreds of times every game.

What about the joy of being involved in baseball? Many umps tell you that umpiring sucks the fan right out of them. They no longer appreciate the game as a whole because they’re focused on judging every little instant. They don't even see some of the spectacular plays because they're eyes are focused on another part of the field.

And the little power and arrogance that they used to wield, has largely been taken away from them by the league. They're made to follow silly rules and huddle and consult. Poor umpires.